William McHenry is believed to have been born in 1771. He married Hannah Ruth Blackford in the late 1790s in Logan County, Kentucky. McHenry served as a Lieutenant in Price’s Battalion of Mounted Volunteers and participated at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, near modern Toledo, Ohio. McHenry moved from Henderson County, Kentucky in 1810. The family settled in what is now White County, Illinois, along the trail between the salt works near Old Shawneetown, Illinois and Fort Vincennes. William McHenry died in 1835 in a boarding house in Vandalia, Illinois, which was then the State capital.